Fall 2018

This course is designed to introduce the student to aspects of the history of Western painting, sculpture, & architecture from the Renaissance through the present. We will examine the various schools & movements in their historical contexts, while paying particular attention to the histories that bear upon them, such as the influence of the classical past, religion, gender, political power, & the rise of the artist. The course will therefore attempt two goals; one, to familiarize students with the principal monuments of the western tradition from about 1400 onward, that is, the paintings, sculptures, buildings, & artifacts which form the substance of this narrative; two, to develop visual literacy, that is, the ability not only to identify but also to discuss art works in a way that develops critical competence & an understanding of how the western tradition of art has come about.

Buildings are among the most public, visible & long lived artifacts that a culture creates. The built environment serves as both a repository of cultural information & exerts an influence that extends beyond the society that created it. This introductory course will explore a visual survey of Architecture from Ancient Times to the present day using a slide lecture & discussion format that will invite each student to participate in the discourse of the class. The studio portion of this course will provide students an opportunity to create their own structures from sketch to 3 dimensional pieces exploring basic design elements & materials. No prior studio experience is necessary. Students will be expected to purchase basic tools used in this course. A materials supply list will be provided at the first class. Students are expected to pay the $50 studio fee to cover the use of shared supplies & equipment. Not open to seniors. To be added to the wait list, please contact stephanie.ashenfelder@rochester.edu.

#blackgirlmagic and the Lemonade syllabus are two recent examples of black women taking collective control over the way they are depicted in American culture. These two projects are reactions against the way black women’s bodies have been constructed as simultaneously human and animal, person and commodity. In this class, we will explore how slavery and colonialism constructed the black female body as monstrous by using foundational feminist texts and current theoretical approaches to black women’s bodies, the white gaze, and black feminism. This framework will help us to consider how racist depictions have transcended their historical origins to contemporary areas of pop culture, government, science, and technology. Using critical texts from Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and bell hooks, we will analyze how black women writers like Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Nnedi Okorafor have used monsters and monstrous black bodies to explore feminine subjectivity and sexuality.

As an introduction to the art of film, this course will present the concepts of film form, film aesthetics, and film style, while remaining attentive to the various ways in which cinema also involves an interaction with audiences and larger social structures.

The seminar will review the history of archaeology and the forms that the discipline takes today, emphasizing the developments and debates over the past six decades. This class focuses on the historical overview of culture, historical, processual and post-processual approaches in archaeology, and topics that illustrate the differences and similarities in these theoretical approaches.

While many of us may or may not live in cities today, their presence as central places for administrative, judicial, and social purposes is undeniable. Both the historical and archaeological record demonstrate the city is not a new phenomenon, but scholars debate over what actually constitutes a city, especially in the prehispanic Americas. To this end, we will read key texts about cities and urbanism that will help us better understand this debate. We will also discuss how recent anthropological approaches to studying cities have helped archaeologists better understand prehispanic urbanism and city-life.

Dance is powerful. Art is a tool that inspires social change. This course examines the relationship between social activism and artistic practice, exploring this integration in dance, art, music, and film. Through a combination of lecture and experiential learning, students will be invited to explore creative social engagement practices to understand the impact of arts in activism while also investigating the creative perspective in successful social movements. Emphasis will be placed on socially engaged art as a practice and philosophy, creative composition within effective social movements, and the power that art can have in promoting social change.

This class explores global trends in film history from 1989 to the present. In considering the contemporary period of cinema, we will look at the technical, social, and formal aspects of the medium. Of particular interest will be new digital technologies for production, post-production, and exhibition in both commercial and independent filmmaking (e.g., CGI, HD, Motion Capture, High Frame Rate), all of which are linked to a network culture that emerges after 1989. We will also focus on geopolitical developments and social upheavals such as the end of the Cold War, the events of September 11, 2001, economic and cultural globalization, and the post-2008 financial crisis as all of these altered various national/regional cinemas and genres (e.g., the spy film, the horror movie, the comedy-drama, and action movies). We will screen the works of major figures in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century world cinema from the United States, China, and Hong Kong to Palestine, Iran, India, and Senegal.

This course seeks to improve students' writing and analytical skills through analysis and experimentation with different styles of writing about contemporary and historical arts. Students analyze prose by artists, historians, cultural critics, poets, and others who have written on the visual arts, with an eye towards how writing on art can be a tool for improving expression in many areas. Slide lectures, discussions, and writing projects on objects of diverse media and historical eras will be augmented by visiting speakers and field trips to museums and galleries. This course fulfills one-half of the upper level writing requirement for both studio and art history majors. Permission of instructor required.

This course explores Hollywood's current fascination with race and gender as social issues and spectacles. In particular, we will focus on the ways that social difference have become the sites of increasingly conflicted narrative and visual interactions in our films. To examine competing representations of racial difference and sexual difference in contemporary US culture, we analyze popular films of the 1980s and 1990s, from thrillers to action films to comedies.

The course studies the archaeology and architecture of buildings in ancient Italy from the fifth century BC to the fourth century AD, adopting a multidisciplinary approach based on archeological evidence, technical and functional aspects, and historical significance. Classes are taught on location and focus on the most relevant monuments and archeological sites in central and southern Italy, including Rome, Ostia Antica, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Baia, and Paestum. The course is divided into three parts: (1) structural design and technical issues related to ancient monuments, (2) monuments of Etruscan Italy and Magna Grecia, and (3) Roman monuments.

This course introduces students to the poetics of television. We will explore the ways that television tells stories, creates characters, and constructs worlds; the significance of genre, style, and form to television; and the horizons of experience that television opens up as the most important mass medium of the second half of the twentieth century. Much of our class will be devoted to closely analyzing and collectively discussing the television we watch, with the emphasis falling on narrative and fictional television in the network, cable, and streaming eras. Through the assignments in the course, students will also come to understand poetics as a useful approach to the study of any medium, an approach that now involves digital tools and technologies in powerful ways.

This course presents a review of key works of Islamic architecture from pre-modern, early modern and modern times. It will also focus on key historiographic trends from the last two centuries, introducing critical issues surrounding orientalism, imperialism, abstraction, ornament, symbolism and expertise. This course does not aim to essentialize Islamic architecture or its temporal or geographic categories. It will rather challenge and think anew the traditions that have formulated this relatively young and, as some have described, “unwieldy” field of art history. Emphasis will be placed on the multicultural and polyvalent traditions of the built environment in the Islamic world. Prior knowledge of Islam or architecture is not necessary, as important concepts and terms will be introduced through readings and discussed in class.The course emphasizes writing, critical thinking, and presentation skills through class discussions and a multi-component digital term project.

The French author Roland Barthes described the emergence of photography in the early 19th century as a “truly unprecedented type of consciousness.” This class traces the emergence of this photographic consciousness in the 19th century as it develops within a number of specific arenas of culture & representation, from the medium’s conception in the early 19th century to its modernization in the early 20th century. The class will allow for general discussion of the history of photography with some detailed discussion of particular photographers, images, & texts. The class will look at photography as a cultural phenomenon as much as an art form, critically studying the various discursive arenas that this new medium helped to foster and redefine. We will also ask what makes photographic images so compelling, what we expect to see in them & what, distinguishes in the photographic realm a document from an artwork, & an ephemeral image from a material object.

When we look at works of art in museums, galleries, and churches we are, in most cases, looking at them out of context. Furthermore, when we look at early Renaissance paintings we do not see them through the eyes of the people who produced them or for whom they were produced. We have to learn to see them as they might have been seen. We can begin to do this by learning how to read and to interpret the complex elements at play beneath the immediate surface by setting the artist, his work, and his public in their social and religious historical contexts, and by exploring the universal unspoken language of signs and symbols used by artists. The course content is based on painted forms, i.e., panels, canvases, and frescos from the Trecento and Quattrocento with an emphasis on Tuscan painting. The selection, as far as possible, takes advantage of the availability of works in churches, museums, and galleries within easy visiting distance of Arezzo.

Shakespeare tells us that "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." But what kind of stage is our world? And what sort of players are we? This class will take up such questions through the interdisciplinary field of performance studies. We will examine topics ranging from self expression and gender performance to forms of ritual and collective action. This course will be taught in English.

Intro to history, technology, cultural significance of motion pictures of the "pre-sound" era, screenings of 35mm prints accompanied by live music in the Dryden Theatre. Special attention to major pioneers, Dickson, Porter, Lumière, Méliès, and Griffith, including a variety of internationally produced films selected from the world-famous archival film collection of the George Eastman House. Same as FMS 247

This course provides a transnational survey of film history, examining the technical and formal aspects of the medium in its production and exhibition. As we explore the development of cinema during this period, we will address a number of aesthetic and technological issues. For example, how did the development of sound technology affect film form? How did it affect cross-cultural cinematic exchange? What is the significance of genre across various film traditions? What did the studio system contribute to Hollywood's success in the international market? How did immigrant and exiled film personnel shape the industries they joined? Weekly screenings and film journals required.

Covering artists from Edouard Manet to Vincent Van Gogh, and from Edgar Degas to Mary Cassatt, this course examines the work and social context of a constellation of artists whose practice in late-nineteenth-century Europe came to be known as Impressionist and Post-Impressionist. These artists’ representations of the city, the suburbs, leisure, labor, class and gender roles communicate a complex worldview in addition to a radical aesthetic. In developing general skills of analysis through the lectures, course readings, and museum visits, students should emerge from the course with a critical comprehension of the artists and their significant works, including the means to interpret the style, subject matter, and history of an emergent modernist art form.

This course asks what happens if you think about art as a commodity rather than in terms of creators, aesthetics, or iconography. Rather than looking at art as self-expression or the work of individual artists, this course looks at art as a commodity and in relation to economic forces. What determines the value of a work of art or an art object and why does value change over time? We will look at case studies providing a historical perspective and at the present-day explosive art market. We will investigate historical evidence on ways in which art was exchanged and evaluated, and how the profession of art dealing evolved. We will look at how dealers became involved in creating brands for artists and ways in which the contemporary art fair has blurred the line between curator and dealer. We will consider how artists work with and against the market and how art and museums figure in economic development. The class will require short writing assignments, a presentation and a research paper.

This course explores how ideas about gender and sex have shaped past and present approaches to health and medicine. We will consider the effects gender, race, and class have had on medical knowledge and practices, with particular emphasis on women’s bodies and women’s health. Topics will include the social and cultural constructions of gender, the politics of human sexuality, women’s interventions in the fields of health and medicine, and reproductive politics. This is a writing-intensive course and may be counted toward the University of Rochester’s Women’s Studies major, minor, or cluster.

This class will explore the various spiritual and artistic traditions of the indigenous peoples of North America. Ranging from the Canadian arctic to the desert Southwest, we will look at various practices including: shamanism, art and hunting magic in the Arctic, art and curing societies in the Great Lakes and Eastern Woodlands, evidence for religious practice in archaeological contexts, and Kachina societies in the Pueblo southwest. More in-depth readings will focus on Navajo sand painting and healing, and Plains Indian spiritual traditions including the Sun Dance and Vision Quest, and their manifestations in the artistic record. We shall also examine late 19th century crisis cults such as the Ghost Dance Religion, and pan-Indian movements in the 20th century like the Peyote Religion, as well as issues concerning secrecy, privacy, and ethics in the study of Native artistic and religious traditions.

This seminar will examine architecture as an ecology of natural resources and materials,
human capital and as a system producing its own indelible carbon footprint. We will explore
the notion of the “anthropocene” and how it is made manifest by, through, and in the built
environment. This course will be focused primarily on the modern period (1800-present) but
will engage earlier sources and examples dealing with naturalism, conservation, and habitat.
The dominant narrative of the period is one of a heroic modernism in architecture, a narrative
that often obscures modern architecture’s troubled legacy of environmental degradation and
destruction. Through a series of advanced readings, we will examine a handful of specific
locations to this end, including the solar house, the mine, the landfill, the scrapyard and
several others. Authors include Siegfried Giedion, Rachel Carson, Benjamin Bratton. Course
discussion will revolve around the readings and students will be expected to produce a final
research paper.

Fall 2018

Buildings are among the most public, visible & long lived artifacts that a culture creates. The built environment serves as both a repository of cultural information & exerts an influence that extends beyond the society that created it. This introductory course will explore a visual survey of Architecture from Ancient Times to the present day using a slide lecture & discussion format that will invite each student to participate in the discourse of the class. The studio portion of this course will provide students an opportunity to create their own structures from sketch to 3 dimensional pieces exploring basic design elements & materials. No prior studio experience is necessary. Students will be expected to purchase basic tools used in this course. A materials supply list will be provided at the first class. Students are expected to pay the $50 studio fee to cover the use of shared supplies & equipment. Not open to seniors. To be added to the wait list, please contact stephanie.ashenfelder@rochester.edu.

The French author Roland Barthes described the emergence of photography in the early 19th century as a “truly unprecedented type of consciousness.” This class traces the emergence of this photographic consciousness in the 19th century as it develops within a number of specific arenas of culture & representation, from the medium’s conception in the early 19th century to its modernization in the early 20th century. The class will allow for general discussion of the history of photography with some detailed discussion of particular photographers, images, & texts. The class will look at photography as a cultural phenomenon as much as an art form, critically studying the various discursive arenas that this new medium helped to foster and redefine. We will also ask what makes photographic images so compelling, what we expect to see in them & what, distinguishes in the photographic realm a document from an artwork, & an ephemeral image from a material object.

This course explores Hollywood's current fascination with race and gender as social issues and spectacles. In particular, we will focus on the ways that social difference have become the sites of increasingly conflicted narrative and visual interactions in our films. To examine competing representations of racial difference and sexual difference in contemporary US culture, we analyze popular films of the 1980s and 1990s, from thrillers to action films to comedies.

Covering artists from Edouard Manet to Vincent Van Gogh, and from Edgar Degas to Mary Cassatt, this course examines the work and social context of a constellation of artists whose practice in late-nineteenth-century Europe came to be known as Impressionist and Post-Impressionist. These artists’ representations of the city, the suburbs, leisure, labor, class and gender roles communicate a complex worldview in addition to a radical aesthetic. In developing general skills of analysis through the lectures, course readings, and museum visits, students should emerge from the course with a critical comprehension of the artists and their significant works, including the means to interpret the style, subject matter, and history of an emergent modernist art form.

Shakespeare tells us that "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." But what kind of stage is our world? And what sort of players are we? This class will take up such questions through the interdisciplinary field of performance studies. We will examine topics ranging from self expression and gender performance to forms of ritual and collective action. This course will be taught in English.

This course provides a transnational survey of film history, examining the technical and formal aspects of the medium in its production and exhibition. As we explore the development of cinema during this period, we will address a number of aesthetic and technological issues. For example, how did the development of sound technology affect film form? How did it affect cross-cultural cinematic exchange? What is the significance of genre across various film traditions? What did the studio system contribute to Hollywood's success in the international market? How did immigrant and exiled film personnel shape the industries they joined? Weekly screenings and film journals required.

This course explores how ideas about gender and sex have shaped past and present approaches to health and medicine. We will consider the effects gender, race, and class have had on medical knowledge and practices, with particular emphasis on women’s bodies and women’s health. Topics will include the social and cultural constructions of gender, the politics of human sexuality, women’s interventions in the fields of health and medicine, and reproductive politics. This is a writing-intensive course and may be counted toward the University of Rochester’s Women’s Studies major, minor, or cluster.

This seminar will examine architecture as an ecology of natural resources and materials,
human capital and as a system producing its own indelible carbon footprint. We will explore
the notion of the “anthropocene” and how it is made manifest by, through, and in the built
environment. This course will be focused primarily on the modern period (1800-present) but
will engage earlier sources and examples dealing with naturalism, conservation, and habitat.
The dominant narrative of the period is one of a heroic modernism in architecture, a narrative
that often obscures modern architecture’s troubled legacy of environmental degradation and
destruction. Through a series of advanced readings, we will examine a handful of specific
locations to this end, including the solar house, the mine, the landfill, the scrapyard and
several others. Authors include Siegfried Giedion, Rachel Carson, Benjamin Bratton. Course
discussion will revolve around the readings and students will be expected to produce a final
research paper.

Intro to history, technology, cultural significance of motion pictures of the "pre-sound" era, screenings of 35mm prints accompanied by live music in the Dryden Theatre. Special attention to major pioneers, Dickson, Porter, Lumière, Méliès, and Griffith, including a variety of internationally produced films selected from the world-famous archival film collection of the George Eastman House. Same as FMS 247

This course seeks to improve students' writing and analytical skills through analysis and experimentation with different styles of writing about contemporary and historical arts. Students analyze prose by artists, historians, cultural critics, poets, and others who have written on the visual arts, with an eye towards how writing on art can be a tool for improving expression in many areas. Slide lectures, discussions, and writing projects on objects of diverse media and historical eras will be augmented by visiting speakers and field trips to museums and galleries. This course fulfills one-half of the upper level writing requirement for both studio and art history majors. Permission of instructor required.

This course presents a review of key works of Islamic architecture from pre-modern, early modern and modern times. It will also focus on key historiographic trends from the last two centuries, introducing critical issues surrounding orientalism, imperialism, abstraction, ornament, symbolism and expertise. This course does not aim to essentialize Islamic architecture or its temporal or geographic categories. It will rather challenge and think anew the traditions that have formulated this relatively young and, as some have described, “unwieldy” field of art history. Emphasis will be placed on the multicultural and polyvalent traditions of the built environment in the Islamic world. Prior knowledge of Islam or architecture is not necessary, as important concepts and terms will be introduced through readings and discussed in class.The course emphasizes writing, critical thinking, and presentation skills through class discussions and a multi-component digital term project.

As an introduction to the art of film, this course will present the concepts of film form, film aesthetics, and film style, while remaining attentive to the various ways in which cinema also involves an interaction with audiences and larger social structures.

This course is designed to introduce the student to aspects of the history of Western painting, sculpture, & architecture from the Renaissance through the present. We will examine the various schools & movements in their historical contexts, while paying particular attention to the histories that bear upon them, such as the influence of the classical past, religion, gender, political power, & the rise of the artist. The course will therefore attempt two goals; one, to familiarize students with the principal monuments of the western tradition from about 1400 onward, that is, the paintings, sculptures, buildings, & artifacts which form the substance of this narrative; two, to develop visual literacy, that is, the ability not only to identify but also to discuss art works in a way that develops critical competence & an understanding of how the western tradition of art has come about.

This class will explore the various spiritual and artistic traditions of the indigenous peoples of North America. Ranging from the Canadian arctic to the desert Southwest, we will look at various practices including: shamanism, art and hunting magic in the Arctic, art and curing societies in the Great Lakes and Eastern Woodlands, evidence for religious practice in archaeological contexts, and Kachina societies in the Pueblo southwest. More in-depth readings will focus on Navajo sand painting and healing, and Plains Indian spiritual traditions including the Sun Dance and Vision Quest, and their manifestations in the artistic record. We shall also examine late 19th century crisis cults such as the Ghost Dance Religion, and pan-Indian movements in the 20th century like the Peyote Religion, as well as issues concerning secrecy, privacy, and ethics in the study of Native artistic and religious traditions.

This class explores global trends in film history from 1989 to the present. In considering the contemporary period of cinema, we will look at the technical, social, and formal aspects of the medium. Of particular interest will be new digital technologies for production, post-production, and exhibition in both commercial and independent filmmaking (e.g., CGI, HD, Motion Capture, High Frame Rate), all of which are linked to a network culture that emerges after 1989. We will also focus on geopolitical developments and social upheavals such as the end of the Cold War, the events of September 11, 2001, economic and cultural globalization, and the post-2008 financial crisis as all of these altered various national/regional cinemas and genres (e.g., the spy film, the horror movie, the comedy-drama, and action movies). We will screen the works of major figures in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century world cinema from the United States, China, and Hong Kong to Palestine, Iran, India, and Senegal.

#blackgirlmagic and the Lemonade syllabus are two recent examples of black women taking collective control over the way they are depicted in American culture. These two projects are reactions against the way black women’s bodies have been constructed as simultaneously human and animal, person and commodity. In this class, we will explore how slavery and colonialism constructed the black female body as monstrous by using foundational feminist texts and current theoretical approaches to black women’s bodies, the white gaze, and black feminism. This framework will help us to consider how racist depictions have transcended their historical origins to contemporary areas of pop culture, government, science, and technology. Using critical texts from Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and bell hooks, we will analyze how black women writers like Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Nnedi Okorafor have used monsters and monstrous black bodies to explore feminine subjectivity and sexuality.

The seminar will review the history of archaeology and the forms that the discipline takes today, emphasizing the developments and debates over the past six decades. This class focuses on the historical overview of culture, historical, processual and post-processual approaches in archaeology, and topics that illustrate the differences and similarities in these theoretical approaches.

Dance is powerful. Art is a tool that inspires social change. This course examines the relationship between social activism and artistic practice, exploring this integration in dance, art, music, and film. Through a combination of lecture and experiential learning, students will be invited to explore creative social engagement practices to understand the impact of arts in activism while also investigating the creative perspective in successful social movements. Emphasis will be placed on socially engaged art as a practice and philosophy, creative composition within effective social movements, and the power that art can have in promoting social change.

While many of us may or may not live in cities today, their presence as central places for administrative, judicial, and social purposes is undeniable. Both the historical and archaeological record demonstrate the city is not a new phenomenon, but scholars debate over what actually constitutes a city, especially in the prehispanic Americas. To this end, we will read key texts about cities and urbanism that will help us better understand this debate. We will also discuss how recent anthropological approaches to studying cities have helped archaeologists better understand prehispanic urbanism and city-life.

This course asks what happens if you think about art as a commodity rather than in terms of creators, aesthetics, or iconography. Rather than looking at art as self-expression or the work of individual artists, this course looks at art as a commodity and in relation to economic forces. What determines the value of a work of art or an art object and why does value change over time? We will look at case studies providing a historical perspective and at the present-day explosive art market. We will investigate historical evidence on ways in which art was exchanged and evaluated, and how the profession of art dealing evolved. We will look at how dealers became involved in creating brands for artists and ways in which the contemporary art fair has blurred the line between curator and dealer. We will consider how artists work with and against the market and how art and museums figure in economic development. The class will require short writing assignments, a presentation and a research paper.

This course introduces students to the poetics of television. We will explore the ways that television tells stories, creates characters, and constructs worlds; the significance of genre, style, and form to television; and the horizons of experience that television opens up as the most important mass medium of the second half of the twentieth century. Much of our class will be devoted to closely analyzing and collectively discussing the television we watch, with the emphasis falling on narrative and fictional television in the network, cable, and streaming eras. Through the assignments in the course, students will also come to understand poetics as a useful approach to the study of any medium, an approach that now involves digital tools and technologies in powerful ways.

The course studies the archaeology and architecture of buildings in ancient Italy from the fifth century BC to the fourth century AD, adopting a multidisciplinary approach based on archeological evidence, technical and functional aspects, and historical significance. Classes are taught on location and focus on the most relevant monuments and archeological sites in central and southern Italy, including Rome, Ostia Antica, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Baia, and Paestum. The course is divided into three parts: (1) structural design and technical issues related to ancient monuments, (2) monuments of Etruscan Italy and Magna Grecia, and (3) Roman monuments.

When we look at works of art in museums, galleries, and churches we are, in most cases, looking at them out of context. Furthermore, when we look at early Renaissance paintings we do not see them through the eyes of the people who produced them or for whom they were produced. We have to learn to see them as they might have been seen. We can begin to do this by learning how to read and to interpret the complex elements at play beneath the immediate surface by setting the artist, his work, and his public in their social and religious historical contexts, and by exploring the universal unspoken language of signs and symbols used by artists. The course content is based on painted forms, i.e., panels, canvases, and frescos from the Trecento and Quattrocento with an emphasis on Tuscan painting. The selection, as far as possible, takes advantage of the availability of works in churches, museums, and galleries within easy visiting distance of Arezzo.